The world will struggle to meet environmental targets around climate change, biodiversity and food production unless we understand our soil.

The contribution of soil to human well-being is often ignored. While we are all aware of the benefits clean air and water provide, this is more opaque with soil. For example, we cannot have clean water without soil. It is also vital for providing food, and the storage of water and carbon.

Only 30% of Earth’s surface is land, of which about 38% is cultivated. Presently, 7800 km3 of topsoil (to 0.5 m) currently sustains seven billion humans, and there is little scope for future expansion. Consequently there is incredible pressure on soils.

Soil scientists classify soils based on their sand, silt, clay and organic matter content. But while this provides some insights into the behaviour of soil, it tells us little about the huge diversity of life that is present within it – a single teaspoon of rich garden soil can hold up to one billion bacteria, several yards of fungal filaments, several thousand protozoa, and scores of nematodes.

And measuring biodiversity does not tell us much about how this microbial ecosystem provides the functions we are so dependent upon.

Action plans

The Soil Security Programme (SSP) seeks to resolve what controls the ability of soils and their functions to resist, recover and ultimately adapt to changes in land use and climate.

The final project, U-GRASS: Understanding and enhancing soil ecosystem services and resilience in UK grass and croplands, uses high-throughput genetic techniques to investigate the microbial composition of soils. It will be sequencing the microbes in soils under different management regimes and at specific points in the landscape e.g. arable areas, extensive grasslands to determine if these can be modelled to optimise beneficial processes such as nitrogen cycling within a particular landscape/management scenario.

These three projects are supplemented by four postdoctoral fellowships and several smaller projects soon to be announced.

Research partners and outcomes

The SSP also has an oversight role in the Soil and Rhizosphere Interactions for Sustainable Agriculture (GFS-SARISA) programme funded by NERC and BBSRC which comprises four projects with a stronger focus on optimising crop yields. These projects are investigating nutrient cycling and disease in soils, determining how the soil microbes and crops can be optimised to reduced agrochemical inputs. They are also investigating how crop cultivars ‘engineer’ the soil to optimise its agronomic potential.

Soil science research is relevant to all agricultural systems. Copyright: University of Reading

]]>http://www.foodsecurity.ac.uk/blog/2016/10/for-food-security-we-need-soil-security/feed/0Investing sweat equity to harness ecosystem serviceshttp://www.foodsecurity.ac.uk/blog/2014/02/investing-sweat-equity/
http://www.foodsecurity.ac.uk/blog/2014/02/investing-sweat-equity/#commentsMon, 10 Feb 2014 09:24:46 +0000http://www.foodsecurity.ac.uk/blog/?p=14852014 is the International Year of Family Farming. Andrew MacMillan reflects on home-grown food.

A couple of months ago, the United Nations launched the International Year of Family Farming. Hopefully, by the end of the year many more people around the world will come to appreciate the enormously important role that family-run farms play in producing our food in sustainable ways.

When I was turning my compost heaps a few days ago to speed up the processes of decay and have lots of organic fertilizer available for the spring-time planting of vegetables, it struck me how often we risk creating confusion with the difficult words scientists and economists use to describe the kinds of things that small-scale farmers do, let us say naturally, every day.

And so, if my wife was to ask me what I had been doing all morning, I could truthfully have said that I had been “busy harnessing ecosystem services and investing sweat equity”, and she would have probably thought that I had become a little bit madder than I already am.

Yet these are the kinds of terms that academics like to use to describe the actions that hundreds of millions of farmers are taking with great success to produce most of the food consumed today by the world’s seven billion people.

Turn, turn, turn

This is the kind of thing that “harnessing ecosystem services” is all about.

Periodic turning of compost speeds up the breakdown of fibrous plant material by letting more air into the heap and by thoroughly mixing up the wet and the dry pockets which tend to develop in the absence of turning. You cannot of course see the bacteria which contribute so much to the decomposition process, but you can easily observe a great scurrying of larger forms of life looking for comfortable new homes in the re-formed heap – woodlice, worms, beetles and their large white maggots and, in the winter, a few mice, rudely awoken from their hibernation.

Bugs and grubs: composting recycles nutrients back to the soil. Image: A. MacMillan

This congregation of enormously diverse forms of life is transforming a pile of weeds, dried grass, household waste (such as peelings from fruit and the outer leaves of vegetables) and ash from the wood-burning fire into a dry brown crumbly nutrient-rich material with which I can mulch and feed the next season’s crops.

It takes, however, quite a lot of my time and energy to bring together the material, create the heaps and turn them over several times. And so this is what the experts define as a “sweat equity” investment, in the sense that I am converting my physical labour into a productive asset.

Looking back for 30 to 40 years, I suppose the most important asset that we have ever created through sweat equity was to build terraces on steep and stony land close to our house in Italy. We – I, my wife and our two young children (who would now be declared child labourers) – used pick axes, crow bars and spades to create four large flat-topped steps, one above the other, climbing up the slope.

It was hard work but it converted unusable land into a highly productive area from which – with the help of compost – we have met most of our needs for fresh vegetables over the years. As farmers in Peru, Yemen, Nepal and the Philippines learnt hundreds of years ago, stones, instead of being an obstacle to cultivation, can play a fundamental role in preventing soil erosion.

Feel a whole lot better

The question that naturally arises is how one can improve the performance of such systems which are typically used by small-scale farmers. As long as sufficient land is available, probably the most critical requirement is to ensure that the family has secure rights to it and that its ability to work is not constrained by poor nutrition, especially during the seasons when labour demand is highest.

The best strategies for assuring a large measure of self-sufficiency will vary from place to place but are often centred on farming systems that are highly diversified. Diversification helps to ensure a well-balanced diet, to spread risks, to even out labour demand and to minimise wastage, for instance through feeding crop residues to small livestock. In many situations securing a stable food supply also requires the preserving and storage of crops so that they can be carried over from seasons of plenty to seasons of shortage.

In this International Year of Family Farming, let us call for a rapid growth in publicly-funded research to create more knowledge on farming methods that help family farmers harness ecosystems and invest sweat equity, enabling them to become less dependent on the purchased inputs which so many farmers have been persuaded are essential ingredients for increased output.

Finally, let us hope, too, that people will vocally condemn the ignorance of those who portray small-scale farmers as primitive, inefficient, unscientific and incapable of feeding the world’s future population.

About Andrew MacMillan

Andrew MacMillan is an agricultural economist specialised in tropical agriculture, former Director of FAO’s Field Operations Division. He recently co-authored a book with Ignacio Trueba entitled How to End Hunger in Times of Crises – Let’s Start Now, Fastprint Publishing.

]]>http://www.foodsecurity.ac.uk/blog/2014/02/investing-sweat-equity/feed/4Sense and sustainabilityhttp://www.foodsecurity.ac.uk/blog/2012/06/sense-and-sustainability/
http://www.foodsecurity.ac.uk/blog/2012/06/sense-and-sustainability/#commentsMon, 25 Jun 2012 08:39:03 +0000http://www.foodsecurity.ac.uk/blog/?p=857Fresh from the Rio+20 conference, Tim Benton ponders the paradox of producing more with less.

In the last weeks, I have attended an unsustainable flurry of meetings and discussions about sustainable intensification, sustainable agriculture or sustainable development (or all three together).

So what does “sustainable” mean, in the context of environment?

Agriculture, the world’s biggest industry, is rightly seen as the engine of development. It also generates the fuel, literally, that we all require. This analogy puts me in mind of the paradox of a perpetual motion machine: if agriculture is indeed an engine generating fuel, how can this be sustained into the future?

However, like a purported perpetual motion machine, where the motion is sustained by often unrecognised inputs (and forever), in the case of agriculture the hidden inputs are the natural capital that has been used extensively to support production. This natural capital has included the impact of fertilisers, land degradation, water use and contamination or erosion of general ecosystem services upon which many societally important functions depend.

Thus, for the engine of development to be sustained in the long term, it needs to manage its environmental impact to limit, or reverse, the erosion of natural capital.

Paradox and productivity

A current use of the ‘S word’ that is topical is in ‘sustainable intensification’.

If, as a first approximation, the amount of agricultural land is fixed into the future, and if yields need to grow to meet demand, then it implies greater output per unit area. This is one of the definitions of intensification – increase in outputs per unit area – and says nothing about the way that the intensification could be brought about (e.g. increasing labour vs. increasing capital inputs and industrialisation of farming practice).

But, in another paradox, the term ‘sustainable’ in sustainable intensification is equally weighted and implies that any increase in yields needs to be brought about by ensuring that the intensification is brought about, well, sustainably.

So what does sustainable agriculture look like? That is very difficult to say for three reasons.

First, sustainable is (probably) a relative rather than absolute term, in that we can always increase sustainability and there is no real threshold beyond which things are ’good’ and before which things are ’bad’.

Second, there are multiple currencies in which environmental impact can be measured – CO2, water and land use, biodiversity impacts etc. – and it is likely that different measures may trade-off against each other. For example, low-carbon farming may have lower yields, requiring more land to produce the same quantity and therefore having a higher impact on biodiversity.

Third, management of land in one place can have impacts far away; whether it is via pollution downstream, carbon emissions contributing to global climate change or indirect impacts working through the market – wildlife-friendly farming giving rise to lower yields in one place, sending market signals to intensify elsewhere.

The complexity of incorporating multiple currencies and direct and indirect impacts near and far means the very definition of sustainable agriculture is moot and often misunderstood. There have been many attempts to define sustainable agriculture simplistically but the danger of simple measures is that they can lead to indirect negative consequences. For instance, transport miles are typically a very small component of carbon footprints which correlate very little with sustainability measured in terms of CO2, let alone farming’s impact on biodiversity.

The best definition we can come up with is that agriculture is more sustainable if a practice does not cause yields to decrease but the environmental impact lessens. If yields do decrease, the agricultural practice may or may not be more sustainable depending on the way that the decrease in yield is made up via market mechanisms (and specifically how the shortfall is made up and where).

Ecology and efficiency

What is increasingly clear is that there must be two key elements to sustainable agriculture.

The first is increasing the sustainability of the agriculturally productive land. This can be brought about by increasing resource use efficiency, managing soils for fertility, reducing erosion (e.g. by land levelling), enhancing production-aiding ecosystem services (e.g. natural pest control) and so on.

The second is ensuring that agricultural landscapes are managed such that they can continue to provide other services useful to society as a whole. These services will vary from place to place: cultural services (such as the look of the landscape, or maintenance of sacred sites), conservation of iconic biodiversity, management of forest fragments to contribute to local climate, fuel, pollination, forage provision, management of marginal strips to reduce pollution or flood control and so on.

If agriculture proceeds at the expense of any or all of these aspects across the whole landscape, both local society and local livelihoods can be undermined. Thus, sustainable agriculture must be about ensuring that within-field practices are more sustainable, but that the matrix of non-agricultural land around fields contributes appropriately to ecosystem services; ’conservation margins’ are not about ‘bunny hugging’ but about maintaining a functioning landscape that provides many services for the good of all.

The “S word” is therefore a beast of many nuances. Being sustainable has to underpin agriculture because, in the long run, if agriculture suffers we will all suffer.

About Tim Benton

Tim Benton is GFS Champion and an interdisciplinary researcher working on issues around agriculture-environment interactions. Formerly, he was Research Dean in the Faculty of Biological Sciences, University of Leeds, and Chair of the Africa College Partnership, an interdisciplinary virtual research institute concerned with sustainable agriculture in sub-Saharan Africa. He has worked on the links between farming and biodiversity (and ecosystem services) for many years.

I am co-author of a new paper – What next for agriculture after Durban? – published in the journal Science. Here are some thoughts from the article and the conference itself.

The 17th conference of the parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) ended two days late on 11 December 2011. The extra time was used by governments to agree the Durban Platform for Enhanced Action (PDF).

The ’Durban Platform’ is simply an agreement to reach a new agreement by 2015 that would reduce emissions and put the world on track to limit global warming by two degrees and come into effect in 2020.

While this is welcome, as was progress in the Green Climate Fund (see footnote 1) and REDD+ initiative to reduce deforestation, much remains to be done to agree who cuts by how much and when, and then for 190-plus countries to agree this including the two largest global emitters – the United States and China.

Unfortunately, decisions on the specifics for agriculture and global food security did not live up to expectations.

Why was progress on agriculture and food security limited?

An agreement was reached on agriculture (see footnote 2) but this used vague, non-committal terms like ’exchange of views‘, ’to consider‘, ’with a view to‘, and ’to look at‘. This means that while agriculture is on the UNFCCC agenda there is no commitment to do anything about it.

Why wasn’t there more progress on agriculture and food security? It wasn’t because there hadn’t been a focus on agriculture and climate change in 2011. There had in fact been numerous meetings and reports. For example the Commission on Sustainable Agriculture and Climate Change, chaired by Professor Sir John Beddington, released a summary of its findings calling for urgent action. African agriculture ministers also issued a unified call for action (PDF) ahead of Durban. Scientists called for action at Wageningen conference on Climate-Smart Agriculture. UN agencies sent a common letter to UNFCCC asking the inclusion of agriculture.

In Durban, Kofi Anan (former UN Secretary-General), Mary Robertson (former President of Ireland), Jacob Zuma (President of South Africa), Meles Zenawi (Prime Minister of Ethiopia) and many other senior figures called for action on agriculture. Caroline Spelman, the Defra Secretary of State highlighted the importance of ‘climate smart agriculture’ for all countries, including the UK, and again called for a work program on agriculture. (Robin Sanders also wrote about the need for climate smart agriculture in Africa on this blog.)

There’s a way – where’s the will?

Five hundred and ninety people attended the third Agriculture and Rural Development Day on 3 December. This looked at how to scale up successful examples of climate smart agriculture that:

Delivers sufficient food, fibre, fuel and incomes

Sustains the health of the land and increases productivity

Does not degrade forests or biodiversity

Sequesters carbon

Reduces net agriculture and food greenhouse-gas emissions

So in Durban there was political support, compelling evidence on the need for action, and successful examples of investment in agriculture achieving multiple wins.

But progress was slow due to the political economy of UNFCCC negotiations. This is complex but in brief there are five issues:

For some countries agriculture is more important in their economies than others, and it becomes a bargaining chip in the negotiations for those where it is less important or those that want a concession in another area

Others are concerned that including agriculture may lead to trade barriers to agriculture exports, and/or trading in agriculture carbon which will only benefit rich farmers and not the millions of smallholder farmer

Agriculture is seen as too complex with limited awareness of existing solutions that can be scaled up under UNFCCC to achieve adaptation, mitigation, livelihood and economic benefits

Forestry stakeholders worry that funding for forestry may be diverted to agriculture

A bureaucratic hurdle – agriculture cuts across the two negotiating streams, one on adaptation and the other on mitigation, but it doesn’t work as it needs to do both causing.

I also believe there is sixth issue closer to home.

This is our failure as scientists that, while we have compelling evidence for urgent action on agriculture to achieve global food security, we need to do better at communicate this evidence to policy makers and the public.

We need a better understanding of the political economy surrounding policy decisions at the global, regional and national levels, and to do better at translating and communicating our research to influence policy.

If we don’t then many of the 1Bn people who will join us by 2025, 500M of them in Africa, will end up poor, hungry, and at greater risk from climate change.

Footnotes

Paras 68 to 71 in Outcome of the work of the Ad Hoc Working Group on Long-term Cooperative Action under the Convention to be presented to the Conference of the Parties for adoption at its seventeenth session. FCCC/AWGLCA/2011/L.4 – http://unfccc.int/2860.php

About David Howlett

At the time of writing, David Howlett was the Executive Director of Africa College and a visiting senior research fellow in climate change and agriculture at the University of Leeds. He has now returned to the UK Government’s Department for International Development (DFID) where he is working on climate change adaptation. At Leeds he worked with research scientists across different faculties and with African research partners to increase the impact of their research including using their results to produce evidence to inform agriculture and climate change policies.

It’s time to engage the public with the difficult choices that lie ahead, says Les Firbank.

Food and farming have rarely been away from the headlines in recent years. One of the ongoing themes has been the alleged departure of modern food production and distribution from so-called ‘natural’ practices. We have seen it in the controversies over genetically modified (GM) crops, the rapid spread of foot-and-mouth disease in 2001, and the risks to human health from BSE in cows and salmonella in chicken eggs.

But as concerns rise about food security and prices, it’s becoming clear that agriculture must try to square the circle between increased production of abundant, nutritious, safe food and maintaining the environment in a more crowded world. Unfortunately, this is far from easy and may require a rethink of public attitudes to food and farming.

For example, everyone agrees that we shouldn’t waste food by giving it to crop pests. So what’s so wrong with insecticides? The days of Rachel Carson’s ‘Silent Spring’ are long behind us; current pesticides, when applied correctly, are much more environmentally benign, are applied in lower doses, are well regulated and levels of residues on food are well below safety levels.

Alternatively, many crops worldwide have a gene that kills those beetle larvae foolish enough to eat them, reducing pesticide use. This gene comes from soil bacteria, Bacillus thuringiensis, and has been introduced into the crops using genetic modification.

Genetic modification is hardly natural; the present generation of GM crops were developed by moving genes from one species to another, and it is possible to create ‘designer’ genes from scratch. But nor is current conventional plant breeding; this often involves using radiation or chemicals in a scattergun approach to generate lots of random mutations. Why should some methods be more acceptable than others?

Difficult decisions

We want to be environmentally friendly. During the 1990s, this seemed to be a simple matter; organic farms were good because, typically, they are home to more wild plants and animals.

Now the choices are becoming more complex: the higher levels of biodiversity can come at the price of lower productivity, and slow-growing livestock release more greenhouse gases (GHG) in their lifetime than do those in more intensive systems.

More environmentally-friendly livestock systems of the future may involve keeping the animals indoors: productive, good for GHG emissions and control of pollution into watercourses, but hardly consistent with current ideas of more ‘natural’, free-range farming.

Furthermore, the increasing global demand for meat and dairy products is being met largely by feeding livestock with crops grown on land that could be used to grow crops for people, using fossil-fuel based fertilisers that take a lot of energy to produce. Should we try to use more food wastes in livestock feed, even though such practices led to the outbreak of the cattle disease BSE? Or is it simply too much to expect that we can meet the rising demand for affordable meat sustainably?

Looking at food labels and marketing material from the food industry, it would be easy to assume that much of our food comes from small, family farms raising a few crops and a few happy, smiling animals. This is a very nostalgic view of productive, environmentally-friendly agriculture that, for the most part, is decades behind us.

We may well need radical changes in the way food is produced if we are to produce abundant nutritious food in an environmentally sustainable way; radical changes that are likely to appear even less natural, even further removed from farming stereotypes. A new generation of food controversies is bound to emerge.

The food debate is already high on the agenda. Now we need to move on from discussing the issues one at a time and engage the public in the difficult choices ahead.

About Les Firbank

Les Firbank has worked for many years on the relationships between agriculture and the environment. He led the UK Farm Scale Evaluations of GM Crops and has researched the impacts of organic farming on wildlife. He is one of the team undertaking the forthcoming UK National Ecosystem Assessment and is currently based at the University of Leeds.

The nature of the food security debate is evolving, looking more broadly at the range of solutions required across different rural landscapes rather than only on farms. Instead of a ‘pick and choose’ approach, policymakers, scientists, farmers and the private sector are looking at how food security, environmental stewardship and economic development are interconnected.

Within these new debates on food security, agricultural productivity must be recognized not only for its role in increasing yields but as part of the solution to meeting biodiversity and climate change goals.

Just in the last month, the Economist ran a debate on biotechnology, Channel 4 broadcast a programme on What the Green Movement Got Wrong, and previously Seed Magazine held its Food Fight debate: just a few examples of the many special editions in mainstream media that are debating agriculture.

I believe we are in the midst of shaping a new perspective on sustainable agriculture, one that has been morphing to mirror the complexities of the challenges we face in the coming generation and beyond.

Over the centuries, farmers have learned how to balance the preservation of the natural environment and the need to feed the world. Yet today, growing populations, climate change and dwindling natural resources impact farmers’ ability to grow crops. In turn, food security challenges put pressure on the environment and climate.

Hence, at Agriculture and Rural Development Day in Cancun last week, experts from various fields in the agriculture sector were brought together to identify practical solutions to reduce agriculture-related greenhouse gas emissions and strengthen food security.

Safeguarding biodiversity

At the Biodiversity World Tour 2010 held in October that was organised by CropLife International, the EU Environment Commissioner Janez Potočnik warned that we have to act urgently to reverse the rate of biodiversity loss, saying “we lost the luxury of choice a long time ago”.

High-yield agriculture has an important role to play in protecting biodiversity. Food production needs to increase on the land already under cultivation. Rather than converting natural habitats such as forests and wetlands into farmland, improving yields on existing land can help preserve vital ecosystems.

Two months ago at the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), the Nagoya Protocol was adopted (PDF) through which world leaders committed to increase the area of protected land in the world form 12.5 per cent to 17 per cent. Increasing agricultural productivity can contribute to meeting these biodiversity targets. Additionally, incorporating integrated pest management (IPM) practices into mainstream farming can improve both pollination and crop protection.

Climate-smart agriculture

Moving on from biodiversity discussions to climate negotiations, the UN’s call to protect conservation areas should be reiterated both as a force for carbon sequestration and also for future strategies involving agricultural development. Whilst one solution for increasing global food production comes from an increase in farmed land, the deforestation necessary for clearing land emits large amounts of greenhouse gases. Plant biotechnology (GM crops) can help farmers to increase current acreage of arable lands, preventing the need for deforestation and eliminating the resultant emissions.

A study published in 2010 concluded that investment in high-yield agriculture since the 1960s has saved the planet from an extra dose of global warming, sparing the equivalent of 590 Gigatons of carbon dioxide from being emitted into the atmosphere. Furthermore, by enabling farmers to produce more on existing farmland, the ‘green revolution’ spared 1.5 billion hectares from being turned over to agriculture.

Biotech crops have already improved the yield and increased the disease and pest resistance for 14 million farmers globally, 90 per cent of whom are small farmers in developing countries. In 2008, the total yield gains of the four principal biotech crops (soybean, maize, cotton and canola) was 29.6 million metric tons. Another 10.5 million hectares would have been needed to produce that same amount of food, had biotech crops not been deployed. In addition, the use of herbicides and herbicide-tolerant crops enables the practice of conservation tillage (no ploughing), which leads to a substantial reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.

With continued investment in agricultural research, new technologies will provide a means of increasing agricultural productivity further, or enabling plants to grow in conditions that they wouldn’t grow in before. Progress in developing varieties that perform well under drought, heat, flood and salinity will be essential for making food security a reality for all, despite future climate scenarios.

A new discussion

Although the challenges of the future seem daunting, much of the knowledge and technology that is needed to feed the world sustainably, enhance biodiversity and adapt to and mitigate climate change already exists.

At this stage, it is essential to commit to and develop the policy and infrastructures needed to support the acceptance of agricultural technologies. Science-based regulations must be the cornerstone to a credible and transparent policy framework, and are essential to establishing public confidence and acceptance of any technology.

If left unaddressed, climate change will seriously impact farmers’ ability to grow sufficient crops, potentially leading to a world where food security is a luxury enjoyed by a minority. Improved agricultural productivity is key to helping farmers meet growing global food demand and benefit from improved livelihoods, while minimizing their carbon emissions and safeguarding natural resources.

About Howard Minigh

Howard Minigh is the President and CEO of CropLife International, the global federation representing the plant science industry.